Monday, 4 June, 2018

LINK: “What have we learned from the Service Design Conference (SD in Gov)”

I’ve not heard anyone disagree that this is a good thing. There were many people at the event who were passionate about user centred services and about designing end to end services. Why is user research not given the priority it needs and why do we still continue to pay little attention to it when undertaking transformation activity and service redesign?

Original: https://medium.com/north-east-lincolnshire-digital/what-have-we-learned-from-the-service-design-conference-sd-in-gov-64e4438a2223

PermalinkLINK: “What have we learned from the Service Design Conference (SD in Gov)”

LINK: “Delivery-driven Government”

The movement to modernize government technology has been focused on the delivery of government services using modern technology and best practices. But that is only half the solution; now we must also learn to drive policy and operations around delivery and users, and complete the feedback circuit. Only then can we effectively achieve the goals government policies intend.

Original: https://medium.com/code-for-america/delivery-driven-government-67e698c57c7b?source=userActivityShare-2e5276a56569-1527862195

PermalinkLINK: “Delivery-driven Government”

Thursday, 31 May, 2018

LINK: “Growing communities beyond the edges of the organisation”

In digitally mature organisations we are used to seeing strong communities of engaged, self-selecting members gathered around a shared purpose beyond that of their day to day jobs. Organisational communities thrive because they add an extra dimension to the organisational structure, and can increase the number of connections each individual has across the organisation’s network.

Original: https://postshift.com/growing-communities-beyond-the-edges-of-the-organisation/

PermalinkLINK: “Growing communities beyond the edges of the organisation”

Tuesday, 29 May, 2018

LINK: “The Ad Hoc Government Digital Services Playbook”

The Ad Hoc Government Digital Services Playbook compiles what we’ve learned from four years of delivering digital services for government clients. Our playbook builds on and extends the Digital Services Playbook by the United States Digital Service. The USDS playbook is a valuable set of principles, questions, and checklists for government to consider when building digital services. If followed, the plays make it more likely a digital services project will succeed.

Original: https://adhocteam.us/2018/05/24/the-ad-hoc-government-digital-services-playbook/

PermalinkLINK: “The Ad Hoc Government Digital Services Playbook”

Saturday, 26 May, 2018

LINK: “Throw away your corporate training plan”

Transforming an organisation is fundamentally about working with people to help them do new things and work in new ways. There’s a whole industry built on workplace training with courses, curricula and training providers to fit almost any skills gap. But when it comes to digital transformation, this way of thinking falls short in several ways.

Original: https://blog.wearefuturegov.com/throw-away-your-corporate-training-plan-e8eae41ae6c8

PermalinkLINK: “Throw away your corporate training plan”

Friday, 25 May, 2018

LINK: “To take the next step on digital, we dropped the word ‘digital’”

Although digital technologies are a powerful way to change a service, what really matters is the method with which change is done: user research, UX design, agile working, co-design, and solving problems in experimental ways. We now want to apply those methods to a wider set of problems, not all involving digital tech.

Original: https://wearecitizensadvice.org.uk/to-take-the-next-step-on-digital-we-dropped-the-word-digital-14b09ec2f25f

PermalinkLINK: “To take the next step on digital, we dropped the word ‘digital’”

Thursday, 24 May, 2018

LINK: “The Hitchhikers guide to Engaging SMEs and Local Government in Innovation”

Due to time constraints, many Local Government Service leads are inevitably ‘heads down’ and perhaps overwhelmed by the variety of technology on offer. It can be hard to team up with neighbouring boroughs because that adds complexity and may slow things down through collaborative decision making. They need more ‘heads up’ time to reflect and review what is going on elsewhere, and try to be open minded and consider wider options – we as SMEs on the other hand need to present our products in terms of their benefits, in plain English, not as a technology offer.

Original: https://medium.com/@hilary.simpson/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-engaging-smes-and-local-government-in-innovation-d9b6d371feff

PermalinkLINK: “The Hitchhikers guide to Engaging SMEs and Local Government in Innovation”

Wednesday, 23 May, 2018

LINK: “Ignore the hype over big tech. Its products are mostly useless”

The endless noise emanating from Silicon Valley essentially has two complementary elements. One is all about dreams so unlikely that they beggar belief: the idea that the Tesla CEO Elon Musk will one day set up a colony on Mars; or that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg can successfully marshal an attempt to “cure, prevent and manage” all diseases in a single generation. Whatever its basis in fact, this stuff casts people and corporations as godlike visionaries, and then provides a puffed-up context for the stuff the big tech companies shout about week in, week out: stuff we either don’t need or, worse, which threatens some of the basic aspects of everyday civilisation.

Original: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/21/big-tech-products-silicon-valley

PermalinkLINK: “Ignore the hype over big tech. Its products are mostly useless”

Tuesday, 15 May, 2018

LINK: “Why Local Government must share the driving to accelerate transformation benefits”

There is a huge opportunity for local authorities to share common digital service patterns for highly defined, commoditised services that are repeated across multiple organisations. For services like reporting missed bins, FOI requests and complaints for example, how fundamentally different should the user journeys for these services be between individual authorities? Or, put another way, at a time of such pressure on public finances, can we continue to justify the level of local variation in the design and delivery of these services that we continue to see across the country?

Original: https://methods.co.uk/blog/local-government-must-share-driving-accelerate-transformation-benefits/

PermalinkLINK: “Why Local Government must share the driving to accelerate transformation benefits”

Two pieces on low code

The low code debate seems to have really kicked off.

Matt Skinner off of FutureGov blogs a critical piece:

The low code platforms we’ve tried place a big emphasis on making the lives of developers simpler (or redundant). Unfortunately, we notice this is at the expense of user experience. Low code makes it harder to take a user-centred, design-led approach.

When creating, you have to follow the platforms’ chosen UI components and design out of a prescribed box. Once completed, you can then tweak to meet your users needs. As the platform uses its own functionality, you are also restricted by what’s been created so far. It’s a world of functionality first and user needs later, which never ever ends well.

Paul Brewer from Adur & Worthing blogged himself in response:

After careful consideration, we went for what I think was a good, pragmatic compromise. Our chosen open standards platform (this is a must), providing a “low code” development environment, has a fixed enterprise licence fee that means we can not only build unlimited apps for ourselves, but can build apps for any public sector body operating in our geography at no additional cost. Development time is much faster than it would otherwise be, and the skills required are significant, but lower than other development environments.

Worth reading both in full to help you decide if low code fits into your strategy.

PermalinkTwo pieces on low code

Thursday, 10 May, 2018

LINK: “And for His Next Act, Ev Williams Will Fix the Internet”

As a co-founder of Blogger and Twitter and, more recently, as the chief executive of the digital publishing platform Medium, Mr. Williams transformed the way millions of people publish and consume information online.

But as his empire grew, he started to get a gnawing feeling that something wasn’t right. High-quality publishers were losing out to sketchy clickbait factories. Users were spending tons of time on social media, but they weren’t necessarily happier or better informed. Platforms built to empower the masses were rewarding extremists and attention seekers instead.

Original: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/business/ev-williams-twitter-medium.html

PermalinkLINK: “And for His Next Act, Ev Williams Will Fix the Internet”

Wednesday, 9 May, 2018

There are no digital silver bullets

In a fairly complex world, everyone yearns for a simple solution. The one thing they should do to make things better. The single solution to all their problems. Digital transformation is no different, and many of the marketers working in this space know it – that’s why they usually claim that their ‘platforms’ will deliver everything an organisation needs to change itself for the digital age.

Sometime people read a single solution into things when it isn’t there. A good example would be my post the other day talking about the uses of low code platforms. Several people got in touch questioning my assertion that it was the answer to all of local government’s problems. I replied pointing out that it wasn’t my assertion, and low code won’t fix everything. It might help for quite a few things though.

Overall, I am always very nervous of transformation programmes that have a single view of the operating model of an organisation, particularly when we are talking local government, which delivers such a bewildering array of services that it would surely be impossible to have just one way of changing and organising them all. Are there really that many similarities between running a theatre and processing benefits? Or picking up waste and community development?

Instead, part of laying the foundations of an approach to digital transformation should be developing an openness to trying new tools, techniques and technology, and an awareness of all the possibilities that are out there.

On the tools and techniques side, this means having a really good knowledge of ways of doing human centred design, innovation and delivery. Check out IDEO’s resources on this, along with the 100% Open toolkit, and of course the GDS service manual.

For technology, really consider the capabilities needed to deliver the outcome your users and your organisation want to achieve. See if you can match those to what you already have, but don’t shoe-horn them in. Think about the maturity of the capability you need: if it is really cutting edge, you may need to build it yourself (whether in-house or outsourced); for everything else there ought to be something on the market to suit. Whatever you do, don’t get bogged down trying to build silver bullets – a universal case management system for everything, or some kind of middleware utopia that makes everything talk to everything else. You’ll end up tying yourself into knots and running a huge IT programme, which is nobody’s idea of fun.

As I said, by all means re-use capabilities wherever you can. It might be that you do end up using one case management system for everything, because it works. Great! But find your way there by iteratively re-designing your way through services, matching capabilities to outcomes, and not through the implementation of a grand technology project.

So is there an operating model that can be applied to everything an organisation does? Probably not.

Is there a change process that can be applied to every service you deliver? Probably not.

Is there a technology platform that will enable you to replace every other system currently in use? Probably not.

Should you try things out, find some alignment between the outcome you want to achieve and the stuff you use to get there? Probably, yes.

Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash

PermalinkThere are no digital silver bullets

Tuesday, 8 May, 2018

LINK: “From service design to systems change”

Systems analysis at the ‘front end’ of service design can help us to better understand complex social problems and identify opportunities to respond more effectively and profoundly. Equally, systems thinking provides tools and mindsets to understand the power structures and ‘system immune responses’ which so often kill new solutions before they get off the ground.

Original: https://medium.com/@adam.d.groves/from-service-design-to-systems-change-72fa62b1714c

PermalinkLINK: “From service design to systems change”